Valery Gergiev admitted recently (before conducting the performance available on LSO Live – 8/08) that of all Mahler’s symphonies he feels he must work hardest at the First to make it convincing. Maybe Christoph Eschenbach shares his misgivings, and that’s why he “improves” the beginning of the Ländler with a spurious shading away and crescendo; and why he burdens the first movement with portents of late-Brucknerian doom and sweetens the third with sickly charm. The orchestra plays with a neatness and promptness that make Mahler’s decoration of symphonic structures with “dirty” folk tunes seem all the more unsettling and in dubious taste, like graffiti on fan vaulting. Instructions such as “with parody” and “like a folk procession” go unheeded. The answer is surely to embrace the banality, not to powder its nose; to show that Mahler’s forward thinking lies not least in integrating different idioms and not merely juxtaposing them for shock value.

In that regard the plain speaking of Alexander Joel’s account is more to my taste: Mahler One, rude and bare. The concert-hall acoustic is more believable than the radio studio for Eschenbach but it also exposes the Braunschweig’s orchestra’s frailties, albeit edited from three concerts, and even the heartiest of codas doesn’t make this a recording to live with.

Blumine is an appropriate filler for Joel’s First whereas Capriccio’s coupling of the Rückert-Lieder is much rarer; the more so for being sung by a real soprano – only Janet Baker’s EMI recording is pitched so high – and then exceptional for Christine Schäfer’s probing engagement with every word and phrase. Placed last (the booklet hasn’t caught up and prints the songs in their published order), “Ich bin der Welt” is slowly and gently confided to us. The gestural kinship with the contemporaneous Adagietto of the Fifth is clear in both recordings, but now the symphonic movement is read as an act of love and not an elegy, so the song takes on affective warmth and is not exclusively bound to times past. So Schäfer may not sit beside us with Baker’s sympathy beyond words but she finds the sense of transience that reveals the song – and the cycle – more than ever as a harbinger of Das Lied von der Erde. Here, too, Eschenbach makes up for some slack accompaniment in previous songs by drawing together some fine wind solos at a temperature just this side of cool.